Manufacturing IT gets judged by one number: is the line running? Office email can hiccup and the world forgives; a production stoppage is measured in dollars per minute and makeup shifts. We’ve supported Northwest manufacturers and machine shops for decades, and the discipline is different from office IT in a few specific, important ways.
The shop floor is its own world — treat it that way
Somewhere on your floor there’s a machine controller running an operating system old enough to vote. That’s normal: production equipment outlives its software by decades, the controller can’t be upgraded without the machine vendor, and “just patch it” is advice from someone who’s never priced a retrofit. The realistic play isn’t modernizing everything — it’s segmentation: put production systems on their own network, separated from office computers, so the unpatched controller can do its job without being reachable from the machines that browse the internet and open email. When ransomware lands on an office PC — and email is where it lands — segmentation is what decides whether you have an IT incident or a production stoppage.
Two related habits: inventory what’s actually out there (controllers, HMIs, networked instruments — you can’t protect what nobody’s written down), and control remote access for equipment vendors. Machine vendors love permanent remote connections into their equipment; each one is a door into your floor. Vendor access should be enabled when needed, logged, and shut off after — not left open since the install in 2019.
ERP and the systems the schedule lives in
ERP, MRP, inventory, scheduling, shipping — when these stop, the floor may keep cutting for a shift, but shipping, receiving, and job costing stop immediately. These systems deserve the full treatment: coordinated patching, vendors managed by your IT so a bad update becomes their problem to escalate rather than your PM’s afternoon, and recovery planned against production reality — how long can you run on paper travelers, honestly? Back it with tested restores and an immutable backup copy: manufacturers are prime ransomware targets precisely because downtime pressure is visible from orbit, and attackers price ransoms against your production schedule.
The office side carries the money risk
The attacks that cost manufacturers the most don’t come through the floor — they come through the front office. Purchase orders, supplier payments, and freight arrangements flow through email at volumes that make payment-redirect fraud a numbers game attackers happily play. The rule is the same one we give every client, and it has no exceptions: changes to payment details get verified by phone at a number already on file, and large transfers take two people. Behind the rule, layered email filtering and recurring training — with purchasing and accounting flagged as the high-value targets they are.
Continuity where the line meets the grid
Northwest manufacturers know the failure modes: winter storms, planned outages, the occasional transformer surprise. Continuity planning here is concrete — UPS units sized and tested so servers and network gear ride through blinks and shut down gracefully through worse; internet failover if shipping, ERP, or vendor connections are cloud-dependent; and a short written plan for running degraded — which orders ship, how the floor gets travelers, who calls customers — because a plant that can limp for a day beats one that stands still.
What good looks like
A manufacturer running well on managed IT gets: a segmented network where office problems stay office problems; production systems inventoried, with vendor access controlled; ERP patched, backed up, and restorable inside the window the schedule can absorb; front-office money movement protected by rules that hold under pressure; and power and connectivity failures rehearsed rather than discovered. The floor doesn’t care about any of this — which is exactly the point. IT’s job in manufacturing is to be the least interesting thing in the building. If your floor happens to be in Gresham and East County or across the river in Clark County, we’ve written about what nearby support for exactly this environment should look like.